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As if the AI industry is only shredding "crappy" books. I recently bought a rare book. It was a boat design book written by a famous yacht designer in the 1940
by jordanb 2mo ago
As if the AI industry is only shredding "crappy" books.
I recently bought a rare book. It was a boat design book written by a famous yacht designer in the 1940s, but it's been out of print for decades and I had to pay $150 for a "fair" copy with missing dust jacket.
I have an interest in older technology and the old ways of doing things (for instance, how do you lubricate the mast of a gaff rigged boat so the gaff jaws don't jam?) I've often found myself reading very old books that have been out of print for a century.
Sometimes I read those books at libraries and I've been the only person to check them out in years (I started doing this back when they still stamped the return date on a card so you could see when it was checked out). Now most of those books have been disposed of by libraries due to yield management software and I've ended up with some of them in my personal collection, but people like me can only save a tiny sliver when most of them are being bought in mass by Sam Altman. When they're gone the knowledge in them is also gone.
We are burning the library of Alexandria and the HN consensus is "those books probably weren't saving anyway."
- infecto 2mo agoOnce you start to realize just many books got thrown out annually before “AI” you have less sympathy. Libraries are one of the biggest contributors to this because there is simply too many books that nobody cares about. I suspect folks are over weighting how much knowledge is being destroyed in these books. If someone actually quantified it that would be amazing but as someone who started going to used book sales at a very young age I just have no sympathy. Most books are worthless. I don’t mean that from a text perspective either.
- _djo_ 2mo agoLibraries usually offer those books for sale to the general public. I just picked up two from my local library that way. AI companies are not doing the same.
- Legend2440 2mo agoAI companies are building the knowledge from the books into their models, which they offer for sale to the general public. Far more people will use the model than would ever have read the book.
- _djo_ 2mo agoThey're not reproducing the information verbatim and with the ability to definitively reference its source. Moreover, not all AI companies are going to get the same books and therefore the same training set, and as companies go bankrupt, training sets are changed, and models abandoned, that information might disappear entirely. It's not at all the same thing as still having the books themselves available somewhere.
- Legend2440 2mo agoOn the other hand, the book can only be in one place and read by one person at a time. People may not even know the book exists or that it contains the information they want. Obtaining access to a copy may be very difficult, even if it is not particularly rare. The AI is much more accessible.
- _djo_ 2mo agoThen find a way to make them digitally available, verbatim, like Google Books attempted to do. I'm sure with the power that AI companies have they can have legislation amended to make it happen. You're defending the indefensible here.
- Legend2440 2mo agoLol, as if they can just get copyright reform passed because they asked nicely for it. They can't legally publish the digital copies, and you know it. Training is fair use but direct copies are not.
- infecto 2mo agoYou are defending something that makes no sense. If you want to get mad at something get mad at copyright law.
- infecto 2mo agoAnd libraries throw away a lot of books that go to the dump. So what? You should be pushing for better copyright law not Amazon for buying up worthless books.
- Arodex 2mo agoPlease scan this book and put it into Anna's library, or keep it for the future. I would be also interested in participating in your costs.
- Aurornis 2mo ago> As if the AI industry is only shredding "crappy" books. Do you, or anyone else, have any source suggesting that they’re buying highly valuable rare books and shredding them? The kind of $150 rare book that you had to buy from a specialty collector who graded it is in a completely different category. You’re thinking of “rare books” in the historically rare, valuable, and collectible category. The book sellers shipping off orders of 1000s of books at a time to these facilities are calling the books “rare” because they may only have 1 copy, not because it’s a collectible with a high price tag.
- _djo_ 2mo agoThere are a ton of niche books like the one the parent is speaking of which might not be considered hugely valuable by the general public or less specialised second-hand stores, but are both rare and valuable in their niche. For instance there were only limited production runs for a set of books on South Africa's participation in the Second World War, and getting hold of them is increasingly difficult. But they have ISBN numbers, so they fall within the group of books being collected and destroyed by AI companies, and as a result might disappear altogether, along with the knowledge inside them.
- rpdillon 2mo agoSeems like getting a copy and scanning it and releasing it as part of a digital library would be a good way to preserve the knowledge.
- kromokromo 2mo agoIm with you, my take-away from the article was of sadness for all the books that are going extinct because of this. Real humans sharing their unique knowledge, packaged in a book.
- rcxdude 2mo agoThe thing is, I doubt this is even in the top 10 causes of books going extinct. I feel like people often over-romanticise the medium, especially.
- tingletech 2mo agoWeeding (the library term of art for selecting works for deacquisition) is a very import part of collection management. It's actually regionally and nationally coordinated so the interlibary loan network does not throw away the last copies. https://cdlib.org/west/ https://cdlib.org/west/ https://papr.crl.edu https://papr.crl.edu https://eastlibraries.org https://eastlibraries.org
- dingaling 2mo agoYou're fortunate if that's the case for where you live. In the UK weeding is at the discretion of the Branch Librarian. Books I checked out 15 years ago have now vanished from the system.
- tingletech 2mo agoUK has a shared print program http://ukpbc.uk http://ukpbc.uk
- rpdillon 2mo agoCan we copy the books? It seems like in an effort to monetize writing, we've created a system that incentivizes destroying it.
- fancyfredbot 2mo agoIt would be nice if your local library hadn't sold their copy but I think your beef is with the libraries, or perhaps with the politicians who failed to fund them in that case. Actually I expect that a copy of most books probably is still available in a copyright library but it might not be easy to access.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo agohttps://runtimewire.com/article/anthropic-settles-book-piracy-case-for-1-5b-exposing-secret-project-panama https://runtimewire.com/article/anthropic-settles-book-pirac... https://www.gadgetreview.com/we-dont-want-it-to-be-known-inside-anthropics-secret-plan-to-destroy-scan-world-literature https://www.gadgetreview.com/we-dont-want-it-to-be-known-ins... https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/08/10/a-mysterious-buying-spree-is-unsettling-europes-booksellers/ https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/08/10/a-mysteri... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o https://dallasexpress.com/national/the-vanishing-page-ai-firms-scan-then-destroy-rare-book-editions/ https://dallasexpress.com/national/the-vanishing-page-ai-fir... https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phishing-3000-book-copies-scan-destroy/ https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phis...